ABSTRACT
Urban heritage preservation in Asian cities has never been easy and is often very complicated. This chapter reports a case from Palembang, the oldest city in Indonesia that has experienced development under different rulers and has endured landscape transformations and changing ideology concepts. Despite Palembang’s long-standing urban history and designation as Kota Pusaka (heritage city), the city is not famous for its heritage tourism. The chapter builds upon a series of investigations conducted through desk research, field observations, and interviews with local community leaders, historians, archaeologists, scholars, and officials from the municipal and provincial governments between May 2019 and November 2021. The findings revealed that the Kota Pusaka programme in Palembang has not been fully operated, and its scope is still limited to designing the physical revitalisation plan. Henceforth, the heritage tourism plan is not fully developed as collaboration and funding opportunities are not widely available. Likewise, the finding also discovered that Palembang’s cultural properties continue to decline in number as none of them is protected by strong regulation. While the investigation identified the growing enthusiasm of the Palembangese people to safeguard their culture, this chapter argues that leveraging people’s knowledge on more varied approaches to heritage preservation is also critical to help them consider the best way to manage urban heritage under Palembang’s rapid development.
